With a 529 plan, you can save for your kids’ college and score some tax benefits in the process. It’s basically an investment account you can only use for future college costs. While there are limits to how much you can save, an IRS rule lets you save even more at once so you can earn more over time.

Any money saved in a 529 plan is considered a gift for tax purposes. This means there are limits to how much one person can contribute and for 2016, the annual gift exclusion amount is $14,000. But you can also pre-fund a 529 plan with up to five years’ worth of savings. It’s called superfunding and here’s how financial site Bayalis Is the Answer explains it:

Let’s do the numbers. Instead of being limited to $28,000 per year, a two parent family can go up to a whopping $140,000 ($14000 * 5 * 2) to fund a 529 in a single year. Basically you are being allowed to give a single recipient five years worth of tax-free gifts in a single year. If you have wealthy grandparents who want a tax-friendly way to divest portions of their estate, you can pile on even more.

We don’t have access to $140,000 to save for a 529 in a single year (we are selfishly funding our own early retirements as well), neither do we have access to wealthy grandparents. We did superfund a little though. We started her off with $48,000 in her 529.

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Like most savings accounts, the more money you have to save and the more time you have for that money to grow, the bigger your return will be. In fact, in the full post, Bayalis shows the difference between saving a lump sum amount in the 529 vs. spreading out the savings over time:

Let us assume that Couple A invest a total of $70,000 in their daughter’s 529, but they do it at the rate of $14,000 a year for the first five years of her life. Couple B decides to superfund and puts in the whole $70,000 in the beginning. If we assume an annual rate of return of 5%...Superfunding yielded $15,298.14 more.